The Secret Story Behind No Man's Sky

No Man’s Sky has captured imaginations since it was first announced at last year’s VGX awards.

No Man’s Sky has captured imaginations since it was first announced at last year’s VGX awards. The space-exploration game is incredibly ambitious, with an entire galaxy of procedurally generated worlds to explore. It’s especially impressive considering how small Hello Games is, hovering at about a dozen employees. During our cover storytrip to their Guildford, England, studios, we spent a considerable amount of time talking about the project’s origin. As it turns out, it’s a story that’s even weirder than we expected.

Judging by the scale of the game and the size of the team, you might assume that work on No Man’s Sky began as an all-hands-on-deck effort following the release of Joe Danger 2. Instead, it began several years before that, as a splinter project within the studio. For a year, a four-person group worked in isolation within the walls of Hello Games, in a secret space with its own entrance and a mirrored window that peered into the rest of the office. They recognize how odd it may seem to outsiders, but there was a definite method to their apparent madness. Here’s the story of the secret development of No Man’s Sky.

“After Joe Danger finished, maybe in the middle of Joe Danger 2, I was having a bit of what I’d describe to people who know me as a mid-life development crisis,” recalls Hello Games programmer, managing director, and co-founder Sean Murray. The series was doing well and the studio was growing, but he detected a familiar pattern. Before founding Hello Games, Murray worked at Criterion, where he worked on the Burnout franchise. He loved Joe Danger, but he was concerned that the studio could fall into a rut of pounding out sequel after sequel.  “Suddenly we were making Joe Danger, and we were making Joe Danger 2, and we were making Joe Danger iOS, and we were making it for Vita and for Linux and for PC and for Mac – that would be seven different versions. And what’s after this? Maybe Joe Danger 3? You kind of think, ‘How many games am I going to make in my life?’”

Joe Danger 2

Murray says that it came at a time when the company was having problems with “a certain publisher.” The publisher was based in the U.S., which meant the time difference between there and his Guildford, England, studio required him to stay late. “I just remember it was around Christmas time, the 21st of December or something like that, and I stayed all night.” During that time, owing to either inspiration, desperation, or a mix of the two, he started to work on an idea he’d been kicking around forever. “The guys came in and I’d started writing this new engine. It was like, ‘It’s time. We’re going to make that game.’ It was just kind of at the right time, and the rest was the guys saying ‘Cool.’ And the madness begins.”

Project Skyscraper
No Man’s Sky came from an idea that Murray had since he was a child, which speaks to one of Hello Games foundational ideas. “In the early days of Joe Danger, when we wanted people to join, we said that we wanted to make games of things that you wanted to be when you’re a kid. Right now, we make a lot of games about being a soldier, as in the industry does. And that’s one thing that kids want to be when they grow up. And that’s a popular thing, but if you think of the range of things that you want to be, whether it’s some kids want to be an archaeologist for a while or a fireman or a policeman or a stuntman or whatever – we do not cover that range very well.”

One of the things that Murray wanted to be when he was younger was an astronaut. “My parents were over [from Ireland], and they were telling me  – and I don’t remember this – that they remember me being seven years old and talking about this game,” Murray says. “And not that I wanted to make it, but that I wanted to play it…. I was playing Elite at the time, and I would talk about games like that and what you could do and where games were going to be and all of that.

“That sounds a bit ridiculous, because every developer says that, ‘It’s the game I’ve wanted to make my whole life,’ or whatever, but it’s a little bit true with this, definitely. And probably a little bit easier to believe and imagine rather than Vin Diesel’s Wheelman is the game I’ve always wanted to make.”

Joe Danger 2

When Murray left Criterion in 2009 to found his new studio, he was moving away from a dependable job to something considerably riskier. At that time, there weren’t many success stories that he could point to, either.  “I was trying to convince the guys that they should leave their really good jobs and come and join me, and Dave [Ream, creative director] in particular sort of got cold feet when I was trying to convince him to leave.”

Murray put together a collection of photos to lure Ream over, separated into two categories. The first group was images of towering office buildings. “I said, ‘This is what we build right now. We’re making these skyscrapers. They’re big and functional and they’re perfectly good, but they’re monoliths and they’re too blueprinted out.” Next came a series of what Murray calls crazy and weird buildings – things like treehouses and minimalist houses, and esoteric Swedish architecture. “This is what I want to make instead,” he said.

The approach worked. “I remember him saying at the time, he was like, ‘That’s cool, and I’ll leave, but on the condition that Hello Games is one day going to make skyscrapers. I want to make something that’s going to compete with what Criterion is doing.’ We didn’t mean it, that makes us sound really pretentious and arrogant, but it’s one of those stupid things that you say with your buddies. ‘We’re leaving this job, and you’re going to regret it! We’ll shut you all down,’ or whatever,” Murray says, laughing. “‘We’ll make the most amazing games!’”

Their first game, Joe Danger, was a whimsical game about a stuntman inspired by classic Nintendo games. Its color and charm belie what Murray says was a tough development period. Money was tight, and Murray had to sell his house to keep the company going. During that time, Murray and studio co-founders Ream, Grant Duncan, and Ryan Doyle, would refer to something called The Game. The point of the exercise was to think about what would be the most ambitious thing they could come up with – limitations be damned. “It was fun, because we weren’t trying to make it, we were just thinking about it while we were making Joe Danger, and it was cheering us up,” Murray says. The Game was also appropriately referred to as Project Skyscraper.